Rich Communication Services (RCS) expected to thrive despite strong competition from non-telco messaging options
A new study from Juniper Research forecasts the total number of Rich Communication Services (RCS) subscribers will grow from 1.2 billion in 2022 to 3.8 billion by 2026; accounting for 40% of global mobile subscribers – a growth of over 200%.
RCS is protocol for messaging across operators’ networks that supports business messaging services, such as chatbots and payments. RCS was supposed to be a kind of next-gen SMS (and MMS, which never got off the ground) and its development became the responsibility of the GSMA since 2008.
However, it took until 2016 to produce a protocol that was acceptable to all parties, in which time the messaging landscape changed beyond recognition, although while SMS traffic is in decline, is proving far more resilient than expected: about a third of mobile phone users send SMS daily.
Some pundits think that 5G might be an RCS gamechanger as it provides faster connections that can more easily support new voice and video messaging formats. Whether this will simply start to erode SMS instead of taking on alternative kinds of messaging remains to be seen.
DT provides some hope
There is support for Juniper’s optimism. Earlier this week Google and DT announced a partnership to boost the operator’s activities in RCS, sovereign cloud and TV services. DT got involved with RCS when in 2015, T-Mobile USA launched its RCS services with Mavenir, and in March 2021, T-Mobile agreed to use Google Messages as the default messaging app on its Android devices, connected to the Mavenir RCS engine.
In the meantime, DT became the majority shareholder of T-Mobile in the US through its merger with Sprint in 2020, and DT and Google extended the arrangement to offer mobile messaging services to millions of Android users in Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.
Also, in June 2020 Mavenir announced that it was interconnecting the RCS operations in Europe of DT, Telefónica and Vodafone, although there’s been no mention of Mavenir in the new announcement.
Alternative tough competition
The new report* predicts that alternative messaging apps will provide fierce competition for rich media business messaging traffic. To combat this threat, Juniper says operators must promote the greater reach of RCS to subscribers over “the fragmented OTT ecosystem” to demonstrate its value.
Despite the competition from messaging apps, the research forecasts global operator revenue from RCS will grow from $230 million in 2022 to over $4.6 billion by 2026.
To capitalise on this growth and combat what it insisits on calling “OTT messaging competition”, it recommends RCS providers employ the simple price-per-message model already been established through SMS business messaging. Juniper argues businesses will be more comfortable with this familiar model.
By 2026, the research anticipates that 95% of RCS business traffic will retain this model.
Retail driving force
The research also predicts that an increasing focus on omnichannel retail will drive deployments of chatbot services in RCS messaging apps.
This will require RCS platforms to offer new monetisation models, such as the session-based model, in which brands and enterprises pay for unlimited messages to a subscriber over a limited amount of time.
In turn, the research urges RCS providers begin forming direct partnerships with online retailers and social media platforms to create frameworks that can support a session-based monetisation model, as RCS business messaging develops.
* RCS Business Messaging: Monetisation Models, Competitor Leaderboard & Market Forecasts 2022-2026.